Peter Dengate Thrush, a New Zealander who serves as ICANN’s Chairman of the Board, was recently part of an agreement made between the organisation and the US Department of Commerce that confirms its effectiveness and plans for internet internationalisation.The Affirmation Agreement confirms ICANN’s model of multi-stakeholder and bottom-up governance of the global internet addressing system and establishes ICANN as a truly international entity.ICANN is the envisionment of a multi-stakeholder, non-profit corporation that coordinates the internet’s addressing system, after it was decided more than a decade ago that the agency should not be controlled by any single government, group of governments or special interests.“The internet is global and it is critical that its governance reflects its international nature,” Thrush said. “Now we can clearly say that a new era of the internationalisation of the internet has begun.”Under the Affirmation Agreement, the US will remain committed to participation in ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee, which is one of the bodies that advises the corporation in its crucial mission of assuring that the internet addressing system remains functional and secure.ICANN’s IDN program is another step the organisation is taking into its effort to make the internationalisation of the internet. The program will allow the use of non-Latin based language characters in the entire domain name, which is expected to increase the number of internet users in the Middle East and Asia.